Shire

by Ali Smith

Sarah Wood (Illustrator)

"You will want to read this book at least three times: once in a headlong rush of fandom; then with an internet connection and a dictionary of poetic terms; and finally in a darkened room with the phone switched off and time to savour Smith's delicious, playful use of language. A truly bewitching collection" - Katy Guest, Independent on Sunday

"Smith is a trickster, an etymologist, a fantasist, a pun freak, an ontologist... a wordsmith to the very smithy of her soul, she is at once deeply playful and deeply serious" - The New York Times

In four short stories – fusions of poetry – Ali Smith pays tribute to the sources, the people and the places which produce and nurture life and art. In an opening up of norths and souths, she traces unexpected conduits between Cambridge and the north of Scotland. Like all of Ali Smith’s work, here spot-lit by Sarah Wood’s delicate art, this is a book that will blow fresh air through the mind and set readers’ pulses racing.

• ISBN10: 0957152825
• ISBN13: 9780957152823
• Publish Date: 1 June 2013
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: UEA Publishing Project
• Imprint: Full Circle Editions Ltd
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 96
• Language: English

Reviews

[brokentune]

This slim volume of four stories - two fiction, two biographical/autobiographical - is not the usual fare of Smith's writing. The two short stories are rather mythical. The two other stories rather biographical.

However, the book holds some interest for me as the stories about Olive Fraser and Smith's meeting with Fraser's friend and biographer Helena Mennie Shire, and of course Smith's own story, reference a lot of places that are quite close to me.

Aberdeen University is literally a ten minute walk away. Cornhill Hospital, where Olive Fraser was a patient for a period of time, is a place I pass by several times a week. Inverness and Nairn are both in easy reach.

And, yet, there is more that moves me about the stories than just passing familiarity with the locations. I was intrigued, too, by Fraser's poetry and how it reflected her state of mind - or rather her different states of mind. The treatment for a mis-diagnosed mental condition she received strongly reminded me of a favourite author of mine who suffered the fatal consequences of a similar mis-diagnosis only some thirty-odd years earlier.

The friendship between the two writers, Fraser and Shire, would play a part in motivating Smith to pursue her own writing.

It is maybe in this context, too, that the last of the four stories - The Wound - was conceived. Like all of Smith's works, Shire is a book about the power of words and language and art. The power to transform. And just as Helena Shire had dedicated her working life to investigate and uncover medieval and renaissance Scots text which would transform the understanding and context of the known interpretation of text from that era, so Smith's story tells of a transformation of man by a self-inflicted admission of vulnerability.

Anyway, I had not heard of either Olive Fraser or Helena Shire, but now all I really want to do is to browse the archives at Aberdeen University library and find out more about them.